Denis Lirette, CPACC
Design Leader & Certified Accessibility Professional
Case studies: www.denislirette.com/work/examples · Passcode: 1234
design@denislirette.com
www.denislirette.com
www.linkedin.com/in/denislirette (opens in new tab)
+1 416 885 8181
Toronto, ON, Canada
www.denislirette.com
www.linkedin.com/in/denislirette (opens in new tab)
+1 416 885 8181
Toronto, ON, Canada
Design Principal
- Leading the design side of a multi-year AI-native transformation at a major full-service airline, partnering with design and technology leadership to establish the operating model that sets how product teams are structured, how they make decisions, and where design accountability sits as AI changes what those teams are able to build.
- Coaching product teams hands-on across discovery and delivery, from framing and validating ideas through spec-driven development and the agentic product development lifecycle, so teams learn new AI practices inside their own work rather than in a training room.
- Guiding the human side of the transformation, holding the direct conversations with leaders and practitioners about roles, skills, and readiness, and building the trust teams need before they will change the way they work.
Design Lead & Accessibility Specialist
- Provided strategic UX consulting across industries, including design system strategy, user research, and end-to-end product design, helping clients ship accessible products faster.
- Led discovery workshops and stakeholder alignment sessions that gave teams a clear product vision and prioritized roadmap to move forward with confidence.
Accessibility Analyst Consultant
- Collaborating with Fable's enterprise clients to evaluate digital products through moderated research, including 1:1 interviews, focus groups, surveys, and usability testing.
- Surfacing actionable insights rooted in lived experience to help product teams identify cognitive accessibility barriers and improve usability for neurodivergent users.
Director of Design, Global Design System
- Established governance frameworks and adoption models for the Global Design System across Canada, Asia, and US business units, ensuring design system integrity at enterprise scale.
- Owned and evolved global Figma libraries that balanced standardization with regional market needs, giving design and development teams worldwide a shared visual language and consistent interaction patterns.
- Drove strategic design system architecture that enabled consistent, accessible user experiences across multiple brands and product lines while reducing fragmentation and preserving regional flexibility.
Manager, Product Design
- Created CSA's first accessibility-first design system from the ground up, partnering with Product, Engineering, Marketing, and 5+ external vendors to deliver standardized, WCAG 2.1 AA-compliant components that dramatically reduced development time and rework.
- Used Figma Enterprise analytics to prioritize high-impact components, focusing effort where it would have the greatest effect on consistency and delivery speed.
- Standardized components and shared design language across vendors, reducing onboarding friction and enabling external teams to contribute effectively from day one.
- Led executive training and presentations that secured organizational buy-in for design system adoption, building support from leadership down.
- Led CSA's first structured product discovery initiative, embedding lean experimentation into product development and delivering an evidence-based roadmap that helped the e-commerce team align backlog with business priorities and increase conversions.
- Spearheaded CSA's Alternative Text Generator MVP, developing the model's core prompt to meet accessibility best practices and positioning the organization to scale AI-driven improvements across its digital products.
- Built CSA's internal UX research practice from scratch, shifting the organization from third-party quantitative data to direct customer insights embedded across the product lifecycle.
Thoughtworks Canada
09-2018 - 10-2022
Senior Design Lead
09-2021 - 10-2022
Manager, Product Design
09-2019 - 09-2021
Senior Product Designer
11-2018 - 09-2019
Senior Product Design Consultant
09-2018 - 11-2018
- Joined Connected as a contract consultant in 2018, was hired full-time and promoted twice before Thoughtworks acquired Connected in April 2022 to strengthen its customer experience capabilities.
- Embedded internal research frameworks that fostered a user-first design culture and significantly reduced design rework across client engagements.
- Created and rolled out a structured coaching framework that improved team retention and accelerated onboarding, making knowledge transfer more consistent for new employees.
- Designed, led, and scaled Product Thinking Workshops for Meta, RBC, and iRobot, helping teams clarify vision, align stakeholders, and uncover high-impact product opportunities.
- Evolved the PTW into a 6-month program for Meta's New Product Experimentation (NPE) group, accelerating idea validation and training 50+ practitioners in structured discovery methods.
- PTWs became a defining part of Connected's reputation in product discovery and contributed directly to its acquisition by Thoughtworks.
Design Director
- Directed UX strategy and creative vision at a boutique creative technology company, wearing many hats across design, research, hardware prototyping, and client strategy to bring novel, immersive experiences to life for enterprise clients and major industry events.
- Built and mentored cross-functional design teams from the ground up, establishing processes and methodologies that helped the company scale from small experiments to large, complex engagements with high-profile organizations.
- Navigated ambiguity and shifting requirements across projects by establishing team alignment, balancing creative intuition with technical constraints, and empowering teams to deliver strong outcomes in changing conditions.
- Contributed to hardware design and the development of early VR/AR prototypes for retail and event activations, pushing the boundaries of what was technically possible while keeping the experience grounded in how real people interacted with the technology.
- Co-authored peer-reviewed research (ACM CHI 2014) on spatial computing usability, contributing to early industry standards for VR/AR interaction design.
- Work produced during this period was featured in the New York Times, TIME, WIRED, TechCrunch, The Verge, Engadget, GIZMODO, and Polygon, reflecting the novelty and impact of the creative technology being shipped.